by Ellis Peters
The upshot, he decided, letting in the clutch, is that young Leslie ought to take back that picture very firmly, resisting all offers to buy it from him, and take it to some absolutely immaculate authority for an opinion. And so I’ll tell him, if he’s in a listening mood, and if no unforeseen explosion blows him into gaol in the meantime.
He spent the rest of the morning in his office doing some of his arrears of paper work on the case, and the early afternoon with Duckett on a visit to the Chief Constable, who was anxious for quick results, partly because the case involved a family so well known in the Midlands, but chiefly because he wanted to get away from town for some shooting at the weekend. The visit comforted nobody, since the Chief Constable still thought of everybody and treated everybody as a classifiable item in a military hierarchy, and Duckett on an important case always became more and more laconic, until his gruffness amounted almost to dumb insolence.
“Waste of time!” snorted Duckett as he drove back towards Comerbourne at the solid, law-abiding pace which was also a symptom of his less amenable moods. “Never let that boy of yours go into the police force, George.”
“He says he won’t, anyhow,” said George. “When it comes to the point he often seems to be on the side of the criminal.”
“All his generation are anti-social,” said Duckett disgustedly.
“No, it’s just a natural sympathy with the hunted, I think, when the odds turn against them. Maybe a feeling that this society of ours makes its own criminals, too, and therefore deserves ‘em.” He wondered if he was projecting his own occasional qualms on to Dominic’s shoulders; better not look too closely in case he was. The depression that sometimes followed a successful conviction was bad enough, without being inhibited by doubts in the thick of the hunt. “Never mind,” he said placatingly, “who knows if something won’t have broken while we’ve been away theorising?”
And when they turned the corner into Hill Street, and saw the concreted apron frontage of the station alive with staring, chattering people, it appeared that indeed something had. The station faced sidelong to the street on the outer side of a wide curve, with a small garden and two seats in front of its windows, and then the concreted forecourt lined out into parking space for four cars. One of the four spaces was now occupied by a flat two-wheeled cart bearing a tin trunk, a small pile of old iron bolts and oddments, a tumbled mound of old clothing and rags, and a top-dressing of three small, silent, staring children. A somewhat larger child in his father’s cut-down trousers and a steadily unravelling grey jersey held by the head a shaggy, fat brown pony. A uniformed constable, with the admirably detached, impervious solidity acquired only after innumerable public embarrassments, sauntered about between the door and the waiting family, gently shooing the shifting crowd along if it became too stagnant, and hypnotising it into pretending to an indifference as monumental as his own.
“God!” said Duckett, as he parked his car. The constable permitted himself a fleeting grin on the side of his face which was turned towards them and away from the public view. “Has Grocott gone off his head and started bringing in all the tickney lot?”
“No, sir, this one brought himself. Claims he has important information.”
“So he got a load aboard before the pubs closed, and brought half the town along as well,” Duckett diagnosed disgustedly, and eyed the composed and dignified children, who looked back at him calmly, as though they had no doubts at all as to who was the alien and the savage. They were not full-blooded gipsies, they had not the soft, mysterious Indian features, the melting eyes, the delicate bones, but something in a coarser grain, olive and wild and sinewy, with a bloom of dirt. “What are they?” said Duckett gruffly. “Lays?”
“No, sir, Creaveys.”
“What’s the difference? Nobody knows who’s married to whom or which kids belong to which parents, anyhow. If you’re a Creavey you are a Lay.”
He stalked into the station, and pounded up three flights of stairs to his own office, with George at his heels. Grocott was at the door before he had time to be called.
“All right,” said Duckett, “let’s have it. That’s Joe Creavey’s pony, isn’t it?”
Joe was the Creavey (or Lay) who was almost no trouble; an occasional blind when business in wool rags and old iron was booming, and just once, with ample provocation, a determined assault with an ash-plant on his wife, but no major sins were recorded against him. He fed his kids, minded his own business without unduly annoying other people about it, and was unmistakably a happy and well-adjusted man.
“Yes, sir. Joe’s below with Lockyer. He came in just over an hour ago, saying he’d got important evidence in the Armiger case.”
Joe was well known in the seedier outer districts of Comerbourne, where he made regular rounds with his pony-cart, collecting rags and scrap, and a good many residents automatically saved their cast-off clothes for him. It was worth making regular use of him, because he would take away for you all kinds of awkward and unmarketable rubbish on which the Cleansing Department tended to frown if it was put out for their attentions; though what he afterwards did with some of the items no one cared to inquire. On this particular morning he had been round the shabby-genteel corner of town which housed Mrs. Harkness, and in addition to collecting the contents of her rag-bag he had thoughtfully lifted the lid of her dustbin in case there should be anything salvageable there. People often put old shoes in dustbins, sometimes in a state which Joe regarded as merely part-worn. He didn’t find shoes this time, he found gloves, and the gloves were aged but expensive leather gauntlets, with woven tapes stitched inside, lettered L.A. He took them instinctively, and only afterwards did he examine them closely, when he was pulled in at one of the suburban pubs and had his first pint inside him. It was then he found that the palm and the fingers of the right glove were stained and stiffened with something dark and crusted, and the left carried a few similar dark-brown stains here and there in its frayed leather. Joe knew who lodged with Mrs. Harkness, she was one of his regular clients; he knew what the initials L.A. stood for; and he knew, or was convinced that he knew, what had saturated and ruined those gloves, and why they were stuffed into the dustbin. He knew his duty, too; the police must be told. But his route to the station had taken him through four more bars before it triumphantly delivered him, and if there was anyone left in Comerbourne who didn’t yet know that Leslie Armiger had murdered his father and Joe Creavey had the proof of it, he must have been going about for the last couple of hours with his ears plugged.
“Blabbed it all over town, and pretty well brought a procession with him. He isn’t exactly drunk, not by his standard, but well away. Do you want him?”
“No,” said Duckett, “let him stew for a bit. I want the gloves, and I think I want young Armiger, too. If there’s nothing in this, now’s the time to talk to him, before we’re sure there’s nothing in it. But let’s have a look at these first.”
The gloves were produced, they lay on the desk with palms upturned, displaying the reddish-black, encrusted smears that certainly looked uncommonly like blood.
“Well, what do you think it is, Gorge?”
“Creosote, for one thing,” said George promptly, sniffing at the stiffened fingers, “but that doesn’t say it’s all creosote.”
“No, traces of roofing paint, too. Johnson had better run them up to the lab., and we’ll see.”
“You’re not thinking of keeping Joe overnight, are you?” asked Grocott.
“Eh? Keep him overnight? What, and dump all that tribe of kids into the receiving home when there’s no need? The Children’s Officer would murder me! All right, George, you be off and fetch the boy along.”
George made the best of a job he never liked, approaching the manager’s office discreetly without getting anyone to announce him, and making the summons sound as much like a request as he could; all the same, Leslie, coming up in haste from the warehouse, paled and froze at the sight of him. Once he had grasped the idea it was
n’t so bad; colour came back into his face and a defiant hardness into his eyes, and he went out by George’s side with a composed countenance and an easy stride, as though an old friend had called him. They had to cross either the shop or the yard, and George hoped he was right in choosing the yard, where Leslie was better known and better understood.
Nobody was deceived, of course, they’d be muttering and wondering the rest of the day; but a van-driver caught Leslie’s eye and cocked up a thumb at him and grinned, and one of the packers walked deliberately across their path so that he could offer a crumpled cigarette packet in passing. The boy looked harassed rather than cheered, but he smiled all the same, and accepted the offering; and with the first deep drag the pinched lines round his mouth relaxed. He sat beside George in the car, drawing deep, steadying breaths, and trying too hard to prepare himself.
“Mr. Felse,” he said in a constrained voice, as George slowed at the traffic lights, “could you do something for me? I should be very grateful if you’d go and see my wife for me.”
“You’ll be seeing her yourself in an hour or so,” said George equably. “Won’t you?”
“Shall I?”
“That depends on what you’ve done, so only you know the answer.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Leslie fervently. “I suppose you can’t tell me what this is all about?”
“You suppose correctly. You’ll soon know, but I won’t anticipate. Now let me ask you the one question I somehow never asked you before. Did you kill him?”
“No,” said Leslie without over-emphasis, almost gently.
“Then you’ll be going home to your wife, and the worst that can happen is that you may be a little late. She’ll forgive you for that, long before she forgives us for scaring you.”
Leslie was so unreasonably soothed and calmed by this tone that he forgot to take offence at the assumption that he was scared. He walked into the police station briskly, wild to get to his fence and either fall or clear it; and suddenly finding himself without George, had to turn back and look for him. He had stopped to speak to a boy in a grammar school blazer who was standing in the hallway.
“My son,” he explained as he hurried to overtake his charge. “He’s still hoping, and so am I, that I’m going to be able to drive him home. I should be off duty by this time.”
“Oh, now, look,” said Leslie with a faint recovering gleam in his eye, “I should hate to keep you after hours, I can easily come some other time.”
“That’s the stuff!” George patted him approvingly on the shoulder. “You keep up that standard, and you’ll be all right. Always provided you’re telling us the truth, of course. Come on, three flights up, and I’m afraid the taxpayer doesn’t provide us with a lift.”
Dominic watched them climb to the first turn of the staircase and pass out of sight like that, his father’s hand on the young man’s shoulder. Was it possible that it was all over already? Leslie Armiger didn’t look like a murderer. But then, what murderer ever does? But he didn’t!
Dominic was convulsed by the secret, uneasy part of him that couldn’t help identifying itself with those in trouble, those trapped by circumstances and cornered, however deservedly, by the orderly ranks of the law-abiding. He felt the demon in his own nature, and trembled, knowing there was no end to his potentialities. He had to let part at least of his sympathy go out to the hunted, because the quarry could so easily be himself. Infinitely more terrible, it could be somebody who mattered to him so desperately as to make him forget himself. It could be Kitty! And yet he wanted not to be glad that it should be the young man in the worn, expensive suit, with the strained smile and the apprehensive eyes.
The surge of relief in his heart outraged him, and drove him out from under the desk-sergeant’s friendly but inquisitive eye into the impersonal pre-twilight of the September evening, to wait on one of the seats in the strip of garden.
So it was that he saw the red Karmann-Ghia swoop beautifully inward from the road to park beside the ragman’s cart, and Kitty swing her long, slender legs out from the driver’s door. His heart performed the terrifying manoeuvre with which he was becoming familiar, turning over bodily in his breast and swelling until he thought it would burst his ribs.
She closed the door of the car with unaccustomed slowness and quietness, and walked uncertainly across the concrete towards the door; and as she came her steps slowed, until within a few yards of the step she halted altogether, her hands clasped tightly in front of her, in an agony of indecision. She looked to right and left as though searching for the courage to go forward; and she saw Dominic, motionless and silent in the corner of the wooden seat, clutching his school-bag convulsively against his side.
He couldn’t believe, even when her eyes lit on him, that it would get him anything. He was just somebody she’d run into once, casually, and not expected to meet again. Probably she wouldn’t even remember. But her eyes kindled marvellously, a pale smile blazed over her face for a moment, though it served only to illuminate the desperate anxiety that instantly drove it away again. She turned and came to him. He jumped to his feet, so shaken by the beating of his heart that he scarcely heard the first words she said to him.
“Dominic! I’m so glad to find you here!” He came out of a cloud of fulfilment and ecstasy to find himself sitting beside her, his hands clasped in hers, her great eyes a drowning violet darkness close before his face. She was saying for the second time, urgently, desperately: “Is Leslie in there? They were saying in the shops the police fetched him from Malden’s. Is it true? Do you know if he’s in there?”
“Yes,” he said, stammering, “he came with my father. Only a few minutes ago.” He was back on the earth, and the bump had hurt a little, but not much, because of her remembering his name, because of her turning to him so gladly. It wasn’t as if he’d been expecting even that. And in any case he couldn’t be bothered with such trivialities as his own disappointments, while she carried such terrible trouble in her face.
“Oh, God!” she said. “Is he under arrest?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so, not yet, , , “
“Your father’s in there, too? I’d rather it be him than any of the others. I’ve got to talk to him, Dominic. Now I’ve got to.”
She released his hands with a vast sigh, and put back with a hopeless gesture the fall of smooth, pale hair that shadowed her forehead.
“I’ve got to tell him,” she said in a tired, tranquil voice, “because if I don’t they’ll only put it on to poor Leslie, and hasn’t enough happened to him already? I won’t let them touch him.” She lifted her head and looked into Dominic’s eyes with the practical simplicity of a child confiding its sins, relieved to exchange even for punishment a burden too great to bear a moment longer. “I killed his father, you see.”
CHAPTER VIII.
DOMINIC TRIED TO speak, and couldn’t find his voice for a moment, and even when he did it tended to shift key unexpectedly, in the alarming and humiliating way he’d thought he was finished with; but Kitty didn’t seem to notice.
“You mustn’t say such things. Even if, if something happened that makes you feel to blame, that can’t be true, and you shouldn’t say it.”
“But I did it, Dominic. I never meant to, but I did. He came to me, and he said: ‘I’m just going to kick Leslie out of here once for all, and boy, shall I enjoy it. And then I’ve got something to tell you. Not here, you come out to the barn, we can be quiet there. Give me fifteen minutes,’ he said, ‘to get rid of his lordship, and then come on over.’ And I wasn’t going to go, I’d made up my mind not to go. I got out the car and started to drive home, and then after all I didn’t, I went round by the lane to the road behind the barn, and parked the car along under the trees by that little wood, and went into the courtyard by the back way. I thought if I begged him just once more he might give in and take Leslie back, and start acting decently to them. After all, he was his son. I couldn’t get it into my head that it was really f
or keeps. People just don’t act like that. Leslie wasn’t there, only his father. He started telling me all his great plans for the future, all excited and pleased with himself, and he had a magnum of champagne and glasses set out on one of the tables. Oh, Dominic, if you knew how obscenely ridiculous it all was, , , “
His mouth ached with all the things he wanted to say to her and mustn’t; his heart filled his chest so tightly that he could hardly breathe. “Kitty, I wish there was some way I could help you,” he said huskily.
“You do help me, you are helping me, you’re lovely to me. You keep right on looking at me as if I was a friend of yours, and you haven’t moved away from me even an inch. But you will!”
